In the wake of the ABC News documentary, “A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains,” many are looking for ways to improve the grave realities of life in parts of Appalachia. The Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Ky., suggests re-creating the Civilian Conservation Corps, which provided labor for a wide range of projects during the Great Depression.
"When we get to dreaming about how to help change the lives of young men and women who are living without much hope today – stuck in poverty, nothing to look forward to, no obvious reason to stay in school, not much chance of finding a job, dealing and doing drugs because that’s what their peers are mostly doing – we don’t look back to the War on Poverty," the weekly opines. "We look back further, dreaming of a time when the federal government acted boldly and decisively to help millions of Americans who were down on their luck, and we dream about whether something like that could happen again."
The Obama administration has made clear its intention to create green jobs. Those types of jobs are a perfect fit for a CCC model, the Eagle argues, noting that the Regional Reforestation Initiative and the Appalachian Coal Country Watershed Team have started a project to reforest old strip mines in Letcher County, which the Eagle serves. Unfortunately, "not much of the just-enacted economic stimulus seems aimed directly at rural Appalachia," the paper notes. "Regional joblessness is rampant, and thousands of young men and women are on the slippery slope of hopelessness." And while huge amounts of taxpayer dollars are spent to try to prevent the problems of Appalachia, $50,000 to $75,000 to keep a single drug abuser in jail for a year, not enough is being spent to treat the causes of the problems. (Read more)
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